Thursday, May 21, 2009

A New Version of Google Chrome, Faster Than Ever

Somewhere in last September, Google announced officially about their open-source browser Google Chrome. Since there, Chrome found good positive responses. Google added many useful features in Chrome later to that. Today, Google announced the updated new version of Google Chrome which is faster than ever. Google referred this version as a Chrome 2. JavaScript-heavy web pages will now run about 30% faster.

Additionally, some useful features have been added. Here are some improvements that you'll notice right away:

Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.

Full Screen Mode: If you've ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.

Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you've previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that's easy to do from the Tools menu.

And here are some improvements that aren't immediately visible, but will make web browsing with Google Chrome more enjoyable:

Increased Stability: Google Chrome is more stable than ever – Google has fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch.

Increased Speed: A new version of WebKit and an update to JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open. Try opening a bunch of web applications and then running your favorite benchmark. You can read more about V8 in JavaScript scalability post on the Chromium blog.

Here's a short video demonstrating some of this new functionality:

If you're already using Google Chrome, you'll be automatically updated with these new features soon. If you haven't downloaded Google Chrome, get the latest version at google.com/chrome.